While eating dinner al fresco with friends in New York City on an unseasonably warm autumn evening, we all winced simultaneously at the sound of a plane flying overhead.

It was a few days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the skies had only just reopened to air traffic. Airplane noise doesn’t traditionally stand out in Manhattan, but given recent events in which fighter jets whizzed above skyscrapers in a worst case-type scenario and the stench of burning buildings and flesh still hung like bricks for a few miles in every direction, we were hardly the only ones who took chilling note.

While I was at a supermarket in Aspen just a few days ago, a boy not older than 4 sat in a shopping cart being pushed by his mom while creating a war — complete with imaginary bombs and noisy explosions — between an apple and potato. Like the planes flying overhead on 9/11, the sound of even pretend detonations affected me gutturally.

It’s been two weeks since the atrocities at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and the thought of guns still makes me shudder with a profound sadness and dread. Couple a toy or even make-believe weapon with a small child and cue my barely stifled sobs.

The conversation on gun control has thankfully heated up in the wake of Newtown, with President Obama and other lawmakers wisely calling for significant reform at the same time the National Rifle Association shoots itself in the foot by inanely insisting more guns are the remedy for the guns already out there.

We need to be signing petitions, calling and writing our elected officials and marching on Washington to demand a total ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines as well as better, more widely available and less expensive care for the mentally ill. Our children’s schools must further safeguard their doors and windows plus update emergency procedures in the event of any number of full-scale disasters.

At the same time, other meaningful measures can and should be underway at home.

If we don’t think that violent video games, shoot ’em-up films, toy weapons and imaginary wars being fought by our young boys contribute in some small way to the more than 33,000 annual gun deaths, we need to think again.

Things like video games help numb children to the atrocities of the same real-life actions. Their adrenaline races when they murder and maim aliens, bad guys and innocent bystanders. Little boys playing with little guns grow up to be adolescents and young adults who often feel falsely empowered by the nonsensical skills they think they’ve developed using a video-game controller or mouse.

Of course only a minuscule few will grow up to become mass murderers, but video games are still abetting “a growing proportion of boys who are disengaged not only from school but from the real world,” according to Dr. Leonard Sax, author of “Boys Adrift.”

Video games and gory movies alone didn’t make Newtown, Columbine, Aurora or any other number of our nation’s mass shootings occur. But families who tacitly allow the desensitization of little kids and adolescents to blood and death, and permit violence — real or imaginary — as an activity played during family time and on home turf are fooling themselves if they don’t think they’re part of a larger cultural epidemic.

As a Dec. 23 article in The Denver Post on parents rethinking video games as gifts for children said: “Everything going on in a child’s home is important to how they will cope with situations they face in life.”

Preventing gun violence is just as much the responsibility of families without actual guns as it is everyone else’s on whom we so readily depend for gun-control solutions.

The sound of planes flying overhead still affects me occasionally, and I can’t imagine watching a child gleefully shoot a toy rifle will ever sit right, either. Other cultures have violent video games, but they generally don’t also have access to the kind of guns that took the lives of 26 innocent souls in Newtown. As long the latter is available in any form, the former should be severely restricted.

Meredith C. Carroll lives in Aspen. Contact her at meredithccarroll@hotmail.com or on Twitter: @mccarroll.